Inspiring Older Readers
The Romance of the Book edited by Marshall Brooks
Published in 1996 by the US-based Birch Brook Press, The Romance of the Book is a selection of excerpts from essays, novels, autobiography and even travel guides that extol the virtues of reading and the physical book. The authors whose work is sampled are about as diverse as they come - Colette, Franklin, Petrarch, Poe, Lamb, Douglass, Thoreau, Fuller, Hazlitt, Gissing, Eliot – and they’re brought together here in alphabetical rather than chronological order. This is a deliberate decision by the book’s editor, Marshall Brooks, to bring into juxtaposition authors who might not, in the normal run of things, find much in common to share space so intimately:
“By arranging the pieces alphabetically, by author, I found that the old and the new, the lighthearted and the serious, and the known and the unknown, were blended together in a pleasing way – guaranteeing surprises and avoiding the unpleasantness of inappropriate formality.”
In truth I think this sounds like a better idea than the way it actually works out in practice. I can’t help feeling that in trying to read the essays sequentially there’s a substantial amount of crashing of gears as your mind tries to mesh into a completely different style or substantially different lexicon. I found it really difficult to slide from excerpt to excerpt and, in the end, I had to read them almost as isolated events with a rest between each.
Ultimately though, enjoyable as some of the selections were, I’m not sure I came away from this book with any real sense of why it’s there in the first place. Brooks has a clear – albeit modest – statement of intent in his introduction:
“The present collection seeks to…suggest what it is about books that makes them special things, and in just what ways people who live with them regard them: why it is that their readers and owners (the two are not always the same) can become utterly fascinated by them.”
All well and good but there is a problem for me with this mission and the selection we’re presented with – I don’t really see that we get any sort of systematic answer to many of those key concerns. The decision to slap the selections into the book in alphabetical order simply works against the emergence of any organised themes or any sense of narrative structure. The overwhelming feeling is that these are just a selection taken from random references by an author to books, reading or book collecting. Anyone writing about their love for books must, I suppose, touch on some aspect of the editors key concerns but in my view touching obliquely on an issue is not the same as offering insights into it.
As I say, that’s not to say that there aren’t some perfectly enjoyable snippets here: how could there not be with so many great authors having been sampled? But all in all I have to say that I was disappointed with the collection as a collection. When someone goes to the effort and expense of putting together a collection of this kind, I like to feel that I’m being offered some new insights, some interesting synergies. Maybe others will find them there but I couldn’t.
Terry Potter
August 2019